Jaws 3 (1983)

Where did it all go wrong for Joe Alves? His visual work was central to the success of Jaws and, to a considerable extent, Jaws 2. When Jaws 3 came around he landed the director's chair, and turned out a movie that is still hailed as one of the worst ever. It's questionable how much of this is his fault: the plot is silly, the script is terrible, and the visuals are some of the worst I have seen in any movie, but as director, it is all 'his' ideal, so officially he must take some of the heat for this.

SeaWorld's Worst Dolphin Feeder 1983

Michael Brody, son of Chief Martin and Ellen, and his little brother Sean, are the two common threads that run through the entire franchise, and despite all their collective trauma at the fins of killer sharks, only one of them seems to show any signs of wear and tear. Michael (this time Dennis Quaid) works in some senior role or other at SeaWorld, but seems to know nothing of even basic aquatic science, and can't even drop a fish right. His girlfriend Katherine is a marine biologist at the park, and when he lands a dream job, he implores Kat to 'give up your life and follow me'. Cute guy!

For whatever reason, Sean comes to visit, and the three get on like a house on fire, hanging in a local bar and indulging in plenty of 'champagne of the working classes' (i.e. beer). I'm not sure just how 'working class' being a doctor of marine biology is, but it's a fun analogy nonetheless! Sean meets a girl, Kelly (Lea Thompson), a water-skiier at Seaworld, and they hit it off.

Meanwhile, SeaWorld has been madeover since being taken over by business moghul Calvin Bouchard (Lou Gossett Jr.) and is now being reopened to the public to much media attention, following once again the classic Jaws theme of mass hysteria under high public scrutiny. SeaWorld is on the ocean, with pretty flimsy metal gates keeping the open water off-limits...or so we think! For whatever reason, a shark slips through the gate one night and finds itself locked in an all-you-can-eat buffet!

But this isn't any great white shark - this is a naturally-reared, wild North Atlantic great white shark...and it's up the duff! ('Oh, she was such a nice shark - how does that happen?!') First she takes out some SeaWorld operative who is charged with closing that damn gate, and then two rascals who sneak onto the property and venture out in the pissiest little rubber dinghy you ever saw! Credit to the fish, it takes out said dinghy in record time.

As one might imagine, all hell breaks loose when it becomes evident to SeaWorld guests that a killer shark is after them, causing Michael to crash no fewer than three vehicles, ruin a perfectly good picnic, and punch a man to carjack his quadbike - all in an effort to help! The second half's many underwater sequences pick all the stitches on the first half. Any veterans will recall that Jaws 3 was released as Jaws 3D, and the early-'80s film technology that went into achieving that brought overall production quality back several decades. Consider, for example, this CGI shot of a mini submersible turning in the water, with half of the craft dissolving as it goes:

Sadly for Alves, most of the live-action above-surface footage scrubs up into an almost-passable movie. Monster movies don't often require the laws of science to apply, but Jaws 3 takes the cake. As any good shark fan knows from Deep Blue Sea, sharks cannot swim backwards as it causes water to flood their gills and drown them. This young hussy of a shark, however, butt-slams her way through a bolted cage and proceeds to escape it backwards. She then goes on to roar underwater (an inaccuracy Jaws the Revenge took to another level by roaring out of water). Physical bloopers are scattered throughout the movie, while bad dialogue and puzzling theories throw us further off course.

Back when I first saw Jaws 3, at the age of 13, I thought it was a shit movie, and enjoyed taking the piss out of it with my family. As with Jaws 2, my DVD copy from back in the day got burned out many moons ago, so I bought a new copy the other day. I still think it is a shit movie, and it is not often that I have come to this conclusion after twelve-odd years of film education. I am often able to identify redeeming features in bad movies, but Jaws 3 has so very few, and if nothing else, it is good for the movie's long-term health for me to promote it as a shit movie that is worth seeing. It is a good laugh, but it is no Jaws.